Now, I don’t have many sources (most of the ones I can find contradict my understanding) beyond verbal ones drawing on old lectures. But, as I was taught it, Sophocles and Seneca have distinctly different tragedies. Per Aristotle,* a tragedy ends with catharsis—thus Oedipus but also "a person falls from their own hubris (arrogance)."
Oedipus Rex is difficult here, despite being a "perfect" example of a Sophoclean tragedy because his downfall is a mixture of fate and arrogance. It works, though, because his denial of fate is an aspect of his own arrogance; it is a serious and complete story, and language embellished by artistic ornament (a stark difference to writers like Bukowski who found embellishing like this a buncha BS). Fear, pity, and a heavy, heavy dose of disgust are involved, and arguably there is some catharsis at the end when Oedipus blinds himself.
Gruesome by our standards, but this is ancient Greece. The ancient Greeks, like any other ancient people, were pretty hardcore. Not that you can generalize, as the Hellenes (as they called themselves) were a diverse country comprised of a variety of city states with different beliefs and approaches. Not so unlike the US today, but things like the Civi—I mean, Peloponnesian War show how conflicted it could be; fascinating place, took at least one class on it with Carol Thomas at UW. But regardless, the ancient world was generally a brutal place without any of today's amenities.
Digression aside, in a Senecan tragedy, it’s more, ‘A person crosses a line and is beyond redemption.’ Thus, Titus Andronicus, a play one of my college professors thought belonged nowhere near the Shakespeare canon. Despite this, it has some good lines, my personal favorite:
“Oh, why should nature build so foul a den
Unless the gods delight in tragedies?”
Now, Titus is a piece of shit from the beginning, there's no doubt about that (this motherfucker kills his own son in Act I, I believe, but I'm too lazy to double check). But his, ah, most disgusting moment comes when Titus does to Tamora what Cartman does to Scott Tenorman, but in reverse: Titus feeds Tamora her sons, baked into a pie (as opposed to his parents in chili), in vengeance for her sons having raped his daughter, Lavinia, then mutilated her in an attempt to prevent her revealing the culprits. Shakespeare one ups South Park, cause Titus also kills his own daughter and is just generally a huge piece of shit.
You do not walk away with an emotional feeling of catharsis or completeness or the plot came full circle—I mean, you can, but you have to piece it together a bit and it still just kinda leaves you feeling a bit uncertain and sickly. As Eliot put it in 'Geronton,' "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"
Or, if you’d rather: Breaking Bad, where evil doesn't reach such a Saw-like level. We’re introduced to Walt, understand him because he’s been humanized, and support him—up until, can we forgive what he’s done? At what point does he cross that line beyond redemption? Cooking meth? Letting Jane die? Poisoning Brock? Working with neo-nazis? Those are unforgivable things. And yet, most audiences root for him. At least, most of the way. (And at what point does it become tragicomic—laughing at another's suffering—see the pizza on the roof scene?)
And then you get, ah, problematic tragedies.
And who hasn’t read Hamlet?
It’s frustrating. He goes one way, then the other, he never quite decides, and so… everyone who’s been to HS lit is just like, “What’s the fucking point?”
Which is the point. Highlighting your disappointment because you expect it to become some bloody crusade, or to have some emotional catharsis and instead it hits you with a kinda sudden conclusion and ends.
This great Professor Streitberger I had came back to this as well and discussed it in the context of being a sort of meta-take on these two styles of plays: will Hamlet become a Sophoclean protagonist or a Senecan one? If memory serves, both Hamlet and Titus Andronicus end at a banquet scene with some stabbing, so there's a parallel here and Shakespeare's not unfamiliar to this—A Midsummer Night's Dream's performance of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' can be seen as a precursor to Romeo & Juliet—I know when I'm tinkering with a few stories, I like to slide in sly references to future ones I'm working on. If I'm smart enough to figure that out, Shakespeare certainly was.
So he leaves no time for a denouement like Sophocles, nor for the growing sickly feeling accompanying Seneca's brutality: you're just left in the lurch of your emotions without a conclusion. Kinda like life, to borrow from Joseph Campbell:
“Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.”
Notes:
*Aristotle viewed Oedipus Rex as a "perfect" tragedy:
—"Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions."
There's something to unpack here so: tragedy imitates life (like a serious film) and has a complete beginning—>middle—>end where the story matters to us for a reason we can connect to (we see something of ourselves in the characters, or something of our lives in their struggles). At the end, you breathe a sigh of relief (catharsis or 'purgation of these emotions').
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